No one is born with an innate understanding of time, and babies must learn to synchronize and coordinate their behavior with the rest of the world. Until then, they demand attention at all hours of the day and night, completely upending their parents’ schedules. And for all of us, travel can be disorienting and disruptive, especially if we visit a place where time is organized quite differently from what we’re used to (like in Spain, with its afternoon siesta).

Such heavy times we live in, and so paradoxical, for while we have enormous material prosperity, light-speed digital connection, and fingertip access to nearly the entire history of human knowledge, we are strategically divided and frightened, force fed by a propagandized media and entertainment complex, and under the influence of a cultural sickness that values death above life.

The mind vs. brain debate has been going on since before Aristotle. He and Plato argued that the soul housed intelligence or wisdom and that it could not be placed within the physical body. In a well-described version of dualism, Descartes identifies mind with the consciousness and self-awareness of itself, with an ability to distinguish itself from the brain, but still called the brain the seat of intelligence.

In the 1990s, a psychologist named Martin Seligman led the positive psychology movement, which placed the study of human happiness squarely at the center of psychology research and theory. It continued a trend that began in the 1960s with humanistic and existential psychology, which emphasized the importance of reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning in one’s life, respectively.